Case Study: Imperial War Museums achieves scalable, rapid digital preservation and global access with Axiell DAMS

Imperial War Museums - Customer Case Study

Imperial War Museums (IWM) manages an enormous and growing collection—over 33 million unique items, more than 23,000 hours of film and hundreds of thousands of photographs—plus large born-digital acquisitions (a videotape scanning project alone will generate ~900 TB over four years). To meet preservation, public access, commercial licensing and ISO 16363 compliance goals, IWM selected Axiell and its Axiell DAMS to handle high-throughput ingest, multi-format transcoding, simple user experience and the scalability needed as file sizes and volumes increase.

Axiell implemented Axiell DAMS integrated directly with IWM’s Adlib collections management system, using machine-led ingest with UMIDs, secure read-only storage, metadata extraction and filename validation to instantly link assets to catalogue records and expose them via Adlib APIs and Collections Online. The result was a dramatic speed and usability improvement—batch imports enabled IWM to process multiple terabytes of film in a single month versus about 0.3 TB in prior months—while Axiell’s modular, scalable platform and close project collaboration delivered a robust, future-proof solution for long-term preservation and wider access.

Imperial War Museums

Rosie Forrest

Collections Systems Manager